


A Vast Without the Curse

by jribbing



Series: Dead horses [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hell Trauma, Hurt Sam Winchester, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Nightmares, Post-Episode: s11e17 Red Meat, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Dean Winchester, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:12:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26998735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jribbing/pseuds/jribbing
Summary: Dean doesn't know how he gets there. Maybe it's where he's always been.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Series: Dead horses [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1970458
Comments: 10
Kudos: 81





	A Vast Without the Curse

**Author's Note:**

> This is related to "They Hammered in His Teeth", but can be read on its own.
> 
> Set post 11x17.
> 
> “I think: My, I can see something every day, and still not believe it exists.”

_ Twelve miles outside of the bayou, there is a sunflower field. _

_ Dean doesn’t know how he gets there. He doesn’t know what day it is. He doesn’t know what time it is. _

_ He knows he hears a triangle. _

_ He knows he sees yellow. A lot of yellow. _

_ He knows there’s a cross out there — crooked, poking from out the corpus like some sort of thorn-injury. Beast growth. _

_ He knows Sam is with him, because that’s all he can genuinely consider. His brother, pushing through the flowers with a grand smile, peeking back at Dean with a face borne of the past — smooth, free, inviting. _

_ Sam waves him forward. His mouth moves. _

_ Dean can’t hear him. He can’t budge. The soil has his ankles, and he knows if he peers down then he won’t much care for what he’s standing on. _

_ The sunflowers are grotesquely beautiful. Dean knows Sam likes them, because he likes those sorts of things. Sometimes, he’s got them in his eyes, when he’s really in the mud about something — those razor golden crowns around his pupils. Weaponizing themselves. Dismantling Dean’s fortitude. _

_ He knows his brother is going to stay in the enormous open. In the yellow. In all that yellow. But Dean doesn’t even know where they are.  _

_ Something’s gone wrong. Something went wrong. Something is wrong. _

_ Sam is looking away from him now. Sam is looking back at him at the same time. It’s a split, frozen moment — suspended for eternity. Dean might not know much else, but he does know this: twelve miles outside of the bayou, there is a sunflower field, and he hates it. _

* * *

Dean is zombie-staring into his coffee mug when Sam’s gentle, morning-voice rumbles, “You practicing divination?”

Dean startles, only to find his brother plopping in the seat across from him at the kitchen table. He hadn’t even noticed him come into the room, much less fix his own cup of caffeine. Sam isn’t exactly being nimble or quiet, either. Difficult to be agile when recovering from a bullet wound, not to mention the brutal smothering. Dean’s lungs coil. He wants to be present. But it’s painful.

“What?” Dean asks dumbly. 

Sam raises an eyebrow, fondly amused, “Divination. Fortune telling. By reading the coffee grounds. Looked like you were concentrating pretty hard there.”

Dean snorts, shakes his head. “Nerd.”

Two ticks of silence, and then, as expected, “Rough night?”

Dean sighs, assesses. He would never confess a hell nightmare. Sam usually knows when those happen anyway, mostly because Dean is hyper aware of when Sam has his, so of course Sam would be in alignment. This was...odd though. Different.

“I guess. I dunno.” Dean grumbles — grumpy, frustrated. He glances up, glimpses Sam’s irises, and thinks about yellow. He thinks about the suffocating smell of dirt. He thinks about Sam, calling his name, and the familiar vibrations being sucked into a vacuum where his ears will never hope to receive it. Sickness curdles in his stomach. Not a nightmare, but whatever it’s doing to Dean’s insides makes it seem like it was.

Sam is way ahead of him. Typical. “You  _ don’t know _ ?”

Dean pushes up from the table, abrupt. Talking about this was a bad idea. “I had a weird dream, alright?”

Sam remains seated, shoulders hunched, maintaining a perfected diplomatic demeanor. “Like a nightmare?”

“No. Well, not really. It was just...unsettling, I guess. It didn’t make any sense.” Dean roughly dumps the rest of his coffee down the sink, the cold, brown liquid splashing up the sides of the basin and splattering on his wrist. He pauses, glaring at the clumps of turbid mess collected at the bottom of the receptacle. If he tilts his neck, it kind of resembles a flower.

“I told you not to eat all those Funyuns before bed.”

Dean slams the porcelain into the drying basket, his skin tingling and flesh burning with phantom sensations and unpleasant memories. He flips his brother off, heading for the door, more than ready to leave the past ten hours in his dust, “Shut up, Samantha. If there were rules about when you could eat them, they wouldn’t have put ‘fun’ in the title.”

Sam laughs at that one.

Dean feels better.

* * *

_ Twelve miles outside of the bayou, there is a sunflower field. _

_ Dean knows he’s tired of this. Knows with a desperate certainty.  _

_ He doesn’t know how he gets there. He never knows how he gets there. Here. Wherever. The cross is out there. Sam is out there. There’s yellow. Seems like more yellow, every time. _

_ Sam likes the field. Sam likes the flowers. Sam is going deeper into the field, deeper into the flowers, deeper into the kingdom of infinite space. _

_ Dean can’t figure out if Sam is drifting away, or the yellow is drifting toward. If Sam is entering or...the yellow is consuming. _

_ Dean doesn’t know where they are. He doesn’t know what is going to happen next. He doesn’t think it will be good. The triangle is getting louder. Sam is getting smaller. _

_ Twelve miles outside of the bayou, there is a sunflower field, and he hates it. _

* * *

A couple of weeks later, Sam has a rough night too. Or at least, one Dean can discern immediately. He’s used to that. He’s better suited for that. His brother — hell-haunted, scar-palmed, turning to him for answers. It’s virtually a relief — to be able to focus on someone else. Sam would argue Dean has been doing nothing  _ but _ focusing on Sam. Nagging, henning, what have you. He has effectively quarantined his brother to the confines of the bunker until Dean has deemed him recovered. Sam has been a relatively good sport. They’re both cognizant of the simple fact that he would prefer to hole up in the library anyway, underneath piles of nauseating texts and dusty archives — a shining beacon for freakishly tall geeks everywhere.

Dean’s own mind is never as trusting. Nothing will ever be as trusting as Sam’s gaze in his direction.

Sam won’t articulate much. He never has, never will. He holds those cards close to his chest, just as Dean taught him, just as John taught Dean. Probably because the words merely don’t exist in the English language. Dean empathizes, as best he can. 

He retires the day, keeps them occupied with all the tasks that Sam loves, that Sam loves to try to get Dean to love, that Dean pretends to put up a fight about, in order to keep the banter alive and Sam’s brain anesthetized. He’ll admit...it works on him just as well. A soothing balm.

Yet, it ends badly. Sam is reading him a passage in Latin, translating as he goes.

(Slowly. Very slowly, because he is training his tongue out of Enochian. He is convincing himself he is  _ not there _ ).

It’s about Calvary. And cross symbolism. Dean must make an aborted noise, because Sam’s eyes cut through him, bisecting, and before Dean can brace himself, he sees sunflowers. He sees their mom. He sees Azazel. He sees Sam on a roof, alone, stepping right off into the black and throwing himself away. He sees a dark, ghost-town road and his vulnerable brother approaching with a shadow at his back. He sees a hole in the earth, plummeting to a cage. He sees a crumbling church and a sky raining fire. He sees a scythe, swinging in an arch. He sees a cloud of smoke, hurtling like a wrench in the atmosphere. He sees his bruised and busted hands, closing stable door after stable door after stable door…

Yellow.

It’s all yellow. 

“Dean?” Sam, beside him, always. Frightened, and concerned — too often frightened and concerned.

Dean’s lips twist — clumsy, so clumsy. “Sorry, yeah, nothing. Keep going. I’m listening.”

Listening, maybe. Transducing, impossible. All Dean can perceive is the thundering audacity of his heart, pounding against his creaky ribs like fists on a prison wall. Prison walls, all around. He’s close, closer to getting it, closer to a phase shift...but not close enough.

Later, he realizes he’d scooted his chair so near his brother, they couldn’t get up without asking the other to move. It’s quite a longer later, though, before either of them does.

* * *

_ Twelve miles outside of the bayou, there is a sunflower field. _

_ Dean doesn’t know how he gets here. He doesn’t know how to leave. _

_ He knows he hears a triangle. Knows it’s a curse _

_ He knows he sees yellow. Knows what it means. _

_ He knows there’s a cross out there. Knows what it’s for. _

_ He knows Sam is going to stay, too. In that field. Because he has always been in that field. And Dean has always been here...just beyond.  _

_ In the vast nothing. _

_ Twelve miles outside of the bayou, there is a sunflower field, and he hates it. _

It’s the next time they’re spilling guts and venting spleens when Dean understands it was a nightmare all along.

**END**

**Author's Note:**

> Things/inspiration sources I hope might have jumped out and winked at you: The Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Auld Triangle, Hamlet, Sophocles, Richard Siken, The Yellow Wallpaper.


End file.
